Routledge rides alone

While Feeney and Finacune were flanking with Kuroki, the “Horse-killer” was with Nodzu, whose business it was to charge the Russian centre before Liaoyang. Bingley had not shifted commands without a good reason. He had made up his mind to get to an uncensored cable after the battle was over, and Nodzu was nearer the outlet of the war-zone. Moreover, it was said that the civilian contingent with Nodzu was not subjected to the smothering system, quite to the same extent as that with the flanker, Kuroki.

Nodzu, himself, did not appeal to Bingley. He seemed like a nice, polite little person of the sort the “Horse-killer” had observed serving behind curio-counters in Tokyo. His voice was light, and his beard wasn’t iron-gray. Bingley remarked that a marooned painter would have a hard time gathering a pastelle-brush from Nodzu’s beard, and he noted with contempt that the general spoke drawing-room Japanese to his staff. The generals whom Bingley respected, roared. They not only split infinitives, but they forked them with flame.

All three officers under Field-Marshal Oyama—Kuroki flanking on the right, Nodzu bearing in on the Russian centre, and Oku pushing up the railroad on the left—had to fight their way to the positions from which the three finally took the city. Many lesser towns and some very difficult passes were picked up on the way. For instance, Oku, the left blade of the crescent, who was being watched by the chief male figure in this narrative (as Bingley was watching Nodzu), changed the flags at Kaiping, Tashekao, and Newchwang on the way, Chinese towns of filth and fatness; and shoved before him in an indignant turkey-trot Generals Stackelberg and Zurubaieff.

Baking hot weather, and Liaoyang ahead! Nogi was thundering behind at the fortress of Port Arthur; Togo was a red demon in smoky crashing seas; blood of the Bear already smeared the Sun flag, and the blood-flower was in bloom in Manchuria.

Bingley felt the floods of hate stir and heat within him on the morning of August twenty-fourth, when over the hills from the right, which was eastward, sounded the Beginning—Kuroki in cannonade. Feeney and Finacune had had the luck to beat him to real action. The next day Oku took up the bombardment on the left. It was not until the following morn that Nodzu leaped to his guns, and the hot winds brought to the nostrils of the “Horse-killer” the pungent breath of powder.

The correspondents were held back in the smoke as usual. Five months in the field, and they had not yet caught up with the war. Again, on the second day of Nodzu’s action, the correspondents were left behind under a guard who was extremely courteous. This was more than white flesh could bear. The civilians implored, demanded. It was remarkable that Bingley did not mix strongly in this rebellion. He was planning carefully, desperately, to be in at the end, and showed the courage to wait. He realized that the battle was far from ended yet; even though Kuroki was mixing hand-to-hand in the east, Oku in the west closing in over barriers of blood, and Nodzu in the centre engaged daily with a ten-mile front of duelists—a bare-handed, hot-throated fiend, chucking his dead behind him for elbow-room.

Bingley studied maps and strategy—not from Nodzu’s standpoint alone, but from the whole. What would he do if he were Field-Marshal Oyama?

The theatre of war was dark on the morning of August twenty-ninth, but in mid-afternoon Nodzu began firing—firing at nothing! He stood still and belched thunder, as if it were something to be rid of; ripping open the very kernels of sound, and making the summer afternoon no fit place for butterflies. Bingley’s eyes were very bright. This tallied with one of his hypotheses. It was a demonstration, under the cover of which his old friend Kuroki was to start a flanking movement.

That night the smileless young giant worked long in his tent. Stretched full-length upon his blankets, a lantern by his side, he wrote hard in his note-books and drew maps of the flying flanker, whom Feeney and Finacune were now following. He showed these maps, all dated to the hour, in London afterward, with the remark that he had divined the strategy of Liaoyang before the battle.

He glanced at his watch, at last, and at his field outfit, which was all packed and in order. Then he slept until dawn. No one slept after that, since Nodzu was up with the first light, like a boy with a new cannon on the morning of the Fourth. Bingley was missed at breakfast. His Korean coolies knew nothing, except that they had been ordered to take care of the Bingley property and wait for orders. The “Horse-killer” had made a clean departure with a good mount and nothing but his saddle-bags. Still, no one fathomed his audacity. Confidently, it was expected that he would be returned in short order by some of the Japanese commanders who happened to read the civilian insignia flaring upon his sleeve. As a matter of fact, Bingley quickly would have been overhauled had he not brooded so long and so well upon the time. The middle Japanese army was too busy that morning to think of one daring civilian.

Bingley’s plan was this: To watch what he could of the battle, unfettered, making his way gradually westward behind Oku until the end, or until such time as he mastered the color and saw the end; then to ride alone down the railroad, nearly to Fengmarong; there to leave his horse, cross the Liao River, and travel on foot down to Wangcheng. He planned to catch the Chinese Eastern at Wangcheng and make the day’s journey to Shanhaikwan beyond the Wall, where the Japanese could not censor his message. In a word, Bingley’s plan was to stake all on reaching a free cable before any other man, and to put on that cable the first and greatest story of the greatest battle of the war.

That was a day in which Bingley truly lived. A mile behind Nodzu’s reserve, he spurred his horse down into a tight darkened ravine, and tethered the beast long to crop the pale grass blades thinly scattered throughout the sunless crevasse. Marking well the topography of the place, so that he could find it again in anything but darkness, Bingley moved back toward the valleys of action. Nodzu was hammering the impregnable Russian position before the city from the hills, and charging down at intervals great masses of infantry to hold the main Russian force in their intrenchments before the city, and thus to prevent the Russian general from sending back a large enough portion of his army to crush or outflank the Japanese flanker.

Noon found Bingley still at large and across a big valley, now almost empty of troops. He was forced to cross one more ridge to command the battle-picture. This required a further hour, and he sat down to rest upon the shoulder of a lofty, thickly timbered hill which overlooked the city for which the nations met—a huge, sprawled Chinese town, lost for moments at a time in the smoke-fog. The river behind was obscured entirely; still, the placing of the whole battle array was cleared to him in a moment. All his mapping and brooding had helped him marvelously to this quick grasp of the field. He wished that he could cable the picture of the city, the river, the railroad, the hills, just as he saw them now—so that London might also see through Bingley eyes. As for the rest—Nodzu’s great thundering guns and his phantom armies moving below in the white powder-reek—he could write that....

“But I’ve got to get a strip of real action—I’ve got to see the little beasts go,” he muttered at length. “It’s a long chance, but I’ve got to get a touch of the blood-end—to do it right. It is as necessary as the lay of the land.”

And down he went, forgetting fear and passing time, even during certain moments, forgetting the outer world that would cry, “Bingley! Bingley!” when he was through.... Deeper and deeper he sank into the white mist of smoke which five minutes before had been torn by flame and riven with rifle crashes.

It was a moment of lull between Nodzu’s infantry charges. A land current of air cleared the low distance. The southern line of intrenched Russian infantry looked less than a mile away. Behind them, the land was pitted and upheaved with defenses to the very wall of the city, having the look, as Bingley observed, as the wind swiftly cleared away the smoke, of the skin of a small-pox convalescent. There was no sign of life in the Russian works, but his quick eye marked that shrapnel was emplaced on the higher mounds.... Had he lived a thousand years for the single purpose of viewing a battle—hundreds of acres of embattled thousands straining in unbridled devilment; a valley soaked and strewn with life essences, yet swarming with more raw material for murder—he could not have judged his advent better. It was the thirtieth of August—the day that Nodzu and Oku began their un-Christly sacrifices to hold Kuropatkin in the city and in front, while Kuroki flanked.

Suddenly—it was like a tornado, prairie fire, and stampede rolled into one—Nodzu of the pastelle-brush beard called up his swarm from thicket, hummock, gulley, ditch, from the very earth, and launched it forward against the first blank ridge of the Russians. This brown cyclone tore over Bingley of the Thames and across the ruffled valley. The “Horse-killer” sat in awe. There was not yet a shot. The Russian trenches had the look of desertion.

“Hell!” he snapped viciously. “Those trenches are abandoned. Kuropatkin might as well be cooling his toes in Lake Baikal for all Nodzu will find there, and he’s rushing as if——”

At this instant the Russian works were rubbed out of vision in a burst of white smoke, and the sound of Russian bullets was like the swooping of ten thousand night-hawks.... A terrific crash, a blast of dust, burnt powder, filings, sickening gases—and that which a moment ago was a dashing young captain with upraised sword was now wet rags and dripping fragments of pulp.

“Shrapnel,” said Bingley. “He’s happy now. He was playing to a gallery of Samurai saints—that little officer.... Nervy devils all—never doubt it.... But we’re walloped—walloped sure as hell. We can never take those works.”

The position of the enemy was now obscured by trembling terraces of white smoke, out of which poured countless streams of death, literally spraying Nodzu’s command, as firemen play their torrents upon a burning building. A rat couldn’t have lived out a full minute in the base of that valley. The Japanese left a terrible tribute, but the few sped on and upward to the first line of Russian entrenchments. A peculiar memory recurred to Bingley. Once in London he had seen a runaway team of huge grays attached to a loaded coal-cart. The tailboard of the cart jarred loose, and the contents streamed out behind as the horses ran. So the hard-hit streamed out from the Japanese charge as it passed over the base of the valley.

Even as the maddest of the Japanese survivors were about to flood over the first embankment, it was fringed with bayonets as a wall with broken glass; and along the length of the next higher trenches shot a ragged ring of smoke—clots of white strung like pearls.... As a train boring into a mountain is stopped, so was Nodzu’s brown swarm halted, lifted, and hurled back.

“The little brown dogs!” observed Bingley with joyful amazement. “Why, they’d keep the British army busy!... And they smile, dam’ ’em—they smile!”

This last referred to the dead and wounded which the hospital corps was now bringing back.... From out of the welter, a new charge formed and failed. Again—even Bingley was shaken by the slaughter and his organs stuck together—Nodzu hurled a third torrent of the Samurai up that unconquerable roll of earth. It curled like a feather in a flame, diminished, and faltered back....

The day was ending—Bingley’s gorgeous, memorable day. He had travelled twenty-five miles on foot; he had caught up with the Japanese army after five months in the field; he had seen Nodzu charge and Zurubaieff hold; he had seen the wounded who would not cry, and the dead who would not frown.

The whole was a veritable disease in his veins. The day had burned, devoured him. He was tired enough to sleep in a tree, chilled from spent energy; so hungry that he could have eaten horn or hoof; but over all he was mastered by the thought of Bingley and his work—the free cable, the story, the Thames, the battle, Bingley, the first and greatest story, acclaim of the world, the world by the horns! So his brain ran, and far back in his brain the films of carnage were sorted, filed, and labelled—living, wounded, dead; the voices of the Japanese as they ran, Russian-pits from which death spread, shrapnel emplacements which exploded hell; barbed entanglements spitting the Japanese for leisure-slaying, as the butcher-bird hangs up its living meat to keep it fresh for the hunger-time; the long, quick-moving, burnished guns that caught the sun, when the smoke cleared, and reflected it like a burning-glass—such were the details of the hideous panorama in Bingley’s brain.

The chief of his troubles was that Liaoyang still held. He had always laughed at the Russians, and looked forward to the time when he should watch the British beat them back forever from India. The valor of the stolid, ox-like holding angered him now. Suppose Liaoyang should not be taken! It would spoil his story and hold him in the field longer than he cared to stay. He had but scant provisions for two days. He planned to be off for the free cable to-morrow night.

“It’s going to rain,” he gasped, as he let himself down at nightfall into his ravine. He heard the nicker of the horse below. It did not come to him with any spirit of welcome, for Bingley was sufficient unto himself, but with the thought that he must keep the beast alive for the race to the cable after the battle.

“Yes, it’s going to rain,” he repeated. “You can count on rain after artillery like to-day.... Living God! I thought I knew war before, but it was all sparrow-squabbling until to-day!”

He found his saddle-bags safely in the cache where he had left them—this with a gulp of joy, for the little food he had was in them. Crackers, sardines, a drink of brandy that set his empty organism to drumming like a partridge. It also whetted his appetite to a paring edge, but he spared his ration and smoked his hunger away. Then in the last drab of day, and in the rain, he cut grasses and branches, piling them within the reach of his horse. A stream of water began to trickle presently down the rocks when the shower broke. Bingley drank deeply, and caught many ponchos full afterward for his mount. Later he fell asleep, shivering, and dreamed that the devil was lashing the world’s people—a nation at a time—into pits of incandescence. The savagery of the dream aroused him, and he became conscious of a strangeness in his ears. It was the silence, and it pained like rarefied air. Wet, stiffened, deathly cold, he fell asleep again.

The next day, the thirty-first, and the worst of the battle, Bingley curved about Oku’s rear to the railroad which marked for him a short cut to the outer world. Another, that day, watched Oku closely as he forced the Russian right wing to face the Japanese, but Bingley, even from a distance, was charged and maddened by the dynamics of the action....

Late in the afternoon, a little to the west of the railway, he stopped to finish his food and gather forage for his horse, when over the crest of a low hill appeared a tall human figure. The Japanese put no such giants in the field, and Bingley was startled by a certain familiarity of movement.

The man approached, a white man. Chill, weakness, and hatred welled suddenly in Bingley’s veins. He was not alone on the road to a free cable. The man he feared most in the world was entered in the race with him—the man he had seen last at the Army and Navy reception, and roughed and insulted, nearly three years before.

Routledge smiled, but spoke no word. Bingley regarded the strong, strange profile, haggard, darkened as a storm arena. He saddled savagely and rode after the other. It was fifty-five miles to Wangcheng, where he meant to catch the Chinese Eastern for Shanhaikwan to-morrow morning—fifty-five miles in the dark, over rain-softened roads.

“Hell! he can’t make it on foot,” Bingley muttered. “I’ll beat him to the train.”

And yet he was angered and irritated with the reflection that the man ahead had never yet been beaten.